Computer science and numerical fluid mechanics - An essential cooperation

The role of computer science in application fields such as computational fluid dynamics has been underestimated for a long time. However, with a growing complexity of application scenarios as well as numerical algorithms and hardware architectures, the need for sophisticated methods from computer science becomes more and more obvious. Just think of the visualization of the in general very large data sets resulting from numerical simulations, parallelization and load balancing in particular in combination with the upcoming multicore architectures and petascale computers, code verification and software engineering for large and highly complex software codes, and, of course, the efficient implementation of classical numerical algorithms which are typically data-intensive and, therewith put a big challenge on data storage and data access concepts. We focus on the last point in this contribution and show two examples in more detail, where computer science contributes to more efficient simulation environments: in the memory management for adaptive space-tree grids and, second, in the field of partitioned fluid-structure interactions.